Robin Falls
by Mr Khan
Summary: Short story, Zoro's POV. Zoro contemplates feelings for Robin when Enel attacks her as in the Skypiea Arc. Update: Robin's side of the story.
1. Chapter 1

Robin Falls

By Mr_Khan

_A short story based upon something canonical in the series that actually supports one of my favorite fan-paired couples, Robin and Zoro. I'm not much for romance fanfics, but I figured it could work for me if I approached it from a somewhat different angle. The events of this story are based upon Episode 180 of the Anime, nearing the climax of the Skypiea Arc._

She was not his nakama, and she never had been. As far as the swordsman was concerned, she was still an enemy. There was nothing she had done to redeem herself in his mind since she had casually strolled out on deck, as if all the events, all of the transgressions, her transgressions, of Alabasta had been undone. Luffy said it was okay, said she was okay, but none on the crew knew exactly when he had made that judgment. What had she done to convince their Captain, when they had been alone in the ruins below Alubarna?

Not that he didn't have faith in Luffy. Certainly not. Otherwise he wouldn't have come this far with the straw-hat, but Luffy was hopelessly naïve, and she was definitely a user, a manipulator. That much had been evident from the deft way she had won over everyone else, working against their affections and having them pretty much all on her side in under ten minutes. She hadn't tried to get to him, and that showed that she was smart, at least. She recognized an iron will when she saw one.

And that was another problem. She was smart. Too smart. She apparently knew things that no other living soul did, and kept that knowledge private. To a manipulator like her, it was possibly the most powerful thing to posses. She would always have leverage, somehow. She always seemed to have some sort of tidbit of information to help out the crew, but she always left the swordsman with a feeling that she wasn't telling everything. Definitely the case with the whole Montblanc Norland thing.

She hadn't reformed at all, either. At least not that the swordsman could see. Even now, as they stood: him, her, and that wild-haired Shandian, facing down this impossibly powerful man-god Enel, she was falling back on her old ways. Enel threatened with his maniacal plan, a plot to blow this island out of the sky with everyone on it, but was willing to take them, winners of the survival game, with him. Her response to this madness? Manipulation, again. She tried applying some of that secret knowledge of hers on Enel, tried to get him to divert his wrath out of necessity of saving… something. A golden bell, or something, but the swordsman wasn't sure. Details like this did not concern him. But either way, here she was again, many days after she was supposedly reformed, trying to manipulate her way out of another situation.

When it came down to it, that was another thing that bothered the swordsman. She had a great physical power, bestowed on her by the devil's fruit. Strong enough certainly to carve her own path in life with her power, much as the swordsman had done with his. But she chose not to use that power to boldly forge her way of life, continuously relying on her words, her secret knowledge, her manipulations. A schemer, he would have called her, but it didn't seem to be the right word.

Anyway it seemed that now her game was up. Enel, at least, was able to see right through her manipulations. There was a man willing to use his power to carve his own path, at least. It didn't stop him from being a dangerous, murderous maniac, but it at least gave him a somewhat ennobling quality. He apparently had some cunning of his own, having guessed at the secret knowledge that she was trying to use to manipulate him. He knew where the bell was, and he was angry that she had tried to obstruct his plans so needlessly. To exact his anger, of course, he used his power. She was standing in between the swordsman and the Shandian, and he had been standing square in front of her, which helped facilitate her danger. He just pointed his finger square at her face, and called forth his power. His divine power, he called it, but the swordsman didn't believe that any more than he believed her little claims and schemes. The finger pointing at her face surged with pent-up electrical energy, and it was unleashed all at once. An attack as quick as, well, lightning. He saw her doom mirrored in her own eyes, which had grown wide with fear. Another despicable emotion. And her eyes became filled with a reflection of the lightning that was about to strike her down. It struck her full-on in the head, as time seemed to slow. Slicing through her face with unmatched ferocity, as her body began to crumple against its onslaught, no doubt knocked out by the shock of it all.

But it gave the swordsman no satisfaction to see her fall, to watch her agonizingly slow descent from her proud, standing pose to inevitably come to land on the white cobblestones of the ruins. It didn't make much sense, really. With all the ways that he resented her, it should have given him at least some grim satisfaction, especially she was getting taken down specifically for trying to manipulate someone. Time continued to flow by at a sluggish pace, as the lightning continued to graze her head, which had now fallen along with her collapsing body. But no, in the end, he didn't get any satisfaction out of watching this woman getting what should have been her due comeuppance.

Woman. Now there was a way in which he rarely thought about her. But she was certainly a woman. Tall, voluptuous, and curvaceous. Always provocatively dressed. Her raven hair and tan skin gave her a distinct duskiness that only increased her allure. Not that he really flipped for that sort of thing, at least, not like that damn love-cook. But she really was all woman. A woman who was falling. Chivalry wasn't really the swordsman's thing, and he had no reason to help her, an enemy. But it just didn't sit right with him.

She wasn't really an enemy anymore, though. She had shed that role in the swordsman's mind, at some point, though exactly when he could not say. Friend, nakama, enemy, user, manipulator, woman. Somehow Nico Robin was actually all of these things to the swordsman, and yet something more than any of them. And she was falling. He had to do something about it.

He moved his swords out of their combat-ready position, moving them so that they would not interfere with what he needed. Time resumed its normal speed, and Robin continued to fall, but the Swordsman, Roronoa Zoro, was faster than that. He leapt forward and grabbed her before her stricken body hit the cobblestones of the ruins of Old Shandra. What could motivate him to show compassion, to go out of his way to help, someone that he had once called enemy? He could not think of the appropriate words, and so grunted out something at the maniacal bastard who had struck her down. Something inadequate to express his feelings, but something that was closest to what his confused mind could develop:

"She's a woman!"

_Love it? Hate it? Review it! I don't do one-shots too much, but this was an idea I was batting around for a long time, to fulfill my desire to do a Zoro-Robin fic that was somewhat grounded in canon._


	2. Chapter 2

_So it is that I conceded to the demands of the mob (okay, the mob was only a handful of reviewers, but their demands have been heeded anyway), and decided to change my one-shot into a two-shot. The story shall be told from the other perspective, from Robin's perspective, as she's blasted by Enel and caught by Zoro._

It seemed that her end had come, but in a way that she could never have predicted. For twenty years she had eluded her fate, the faceless masses that had pursued her, condemned her, demonized her. Twenty years of running, fighting, and surviving, all for the same reason. Any and all who held allegiance to the World Government had declared her to be their enemy, and she had lived with that for so long. She had never had much hope for her mission, and, for a long time, had been prepared for her inevitable capture and execution by the World Government. That's what made this so difficult for her: not that she was going to die, but that she was going to die so meaninglessly.

For years she had fought and survived, and nearly died, but all for a cause. The people who wanted her dead wanted her dead for a reason. They acknowledged her mission to discover the true history, they validated her existence by trying to kill her for who she was. But now, none of it mattered. She was going to die for nothing, by the hand of this man who cared nothing for who she was. He had never heard of her, he had no regard for the Demon Child of Ohara. He was just killing her because she stood between him and the Golden Bell of Shandra. Gold. That was why she was being killed. Gold. No grand ideological cause, but just because a megalomaniacal man with a logia fruit and a god complex wanted some Gold. It was enough to break the archaeologist's spirit like nothing else had.

It was especially crushing for her because she had just had hope restored to her life. She had found refuge with a group that was different, different from all the other groups that had harbored her over the years. She had worked with the savage, the greedy, the ignorant, all kinds of people who had used her for her talents, but had ultimately resented her, and had turned her adrift as soon as she became too much of a liability. She had hoped that these people, the Straw Hats, were ones that she might one day come to call "friends." Or call them "nakama," as they seemed to want to refer to one another. They were probably the first people she had met since Saul that truly cared about her, that wanted to see her be happy, let alone want to see her alive at all.

Well, most of them, anyway. The Swordsman was none too keen on her, but that was nothing new. He was wise to be wary of her, probably the wisest out of that lovable crew of dreamers. After a lifetime of her bitterness, she had no reason to resent anyone for being wary of her. But she did not have time to contemplate her nascent relationship with the green-haired swordsman, because her doom was upon her. She watched as the man-god pointed his finger square at her head. Watched as the finger lit up with his electric logia power, and watched as the lethal bolt filled all of her vision, before it finally struck her head.

The pain was excruciating, but she didn't particularly mind. Again and again, she had made her peace with the thought of death. Each brush with death had steeled her heart more and more against the fear of it. It was time for her to die, but this was something she had been ready for. Her only regret was that she was dying like this, in a circumstance totally unrelated to her lifelong quest. The voltage arced through her, past her, and she began to fall. Not unconscious, as it probably appeared, but close to it. She was still aware, but her whole body was falling limp under her. It was her time to die, but the scenario was all wrong.

Okay, so not entirely wrong. There was one thing that fit. In many scenarios she had imagined for her death, all across the years, she had imagined a drawn-out execution, or a quick, off-hand slaying at the hands of government agents, but the two constants were that she was being killed by World Government agents, and that she was dying alone, isolated from anyone that cared about her. That condition at least was fulfilled. The Swordsman still resented her, and wasn't going to help her. She had thought she had heard the Navigator scream out her name, but that was probably just her mind trying to inject some hope into this hopeless situation. She was dying alone.

She deserved this, she thought in the darkest part of her heart. Nico Robin, demon of Ohara, deserved this. This was the death that she had earned through her lifetime of treachery. The reason she was being struck down by this man-god was because she had tried to deal with him like she had dealt with all the powerful men that she had used in her life: she had tried to leverage her knowledge to get them to do what she wanted. In this case, she had tried to play on his greed for the legendary Golden Bell of Shandra, whose location she had deduced in her investigations on Skypiea. He had little patience for her, and had finally dealt with her as she had long deserved.

But there was no longer time for her despair. Her time had come. She was falling to the ground faster, her legs having given out completely. Her consciousness, her mind, began to blur, all becoming a haze of sadness. But suddenly, a disturbance. Something had stopped her from falling. Her head had not crashed against the pavement, so something must have caught her. Some_one_ must have caught her. As she finally lost consciousness, she heard a voice she had not expected to hear, saying words she had never expected that voice to say. At least, not towards her. The gruff, masculine voice of a man who, it turned out, understood her best of all.

"She's a woman!"

As she lost consciousness, she was happy.

_I hope she didn't sound too emo. I tried to capture that depression she seemed to have, that indifference to the idea of dying, and that vague self-loathing, that she had before the Enies Lobby Arc. She still had her dream, but figured her failure was inevitable._


End file.
